We explicitly describe
the best approximation in
geodesic submanifolds of positive definite matrices
obtained from involutive
congruence transformations on the
Cartan-Hadamard manifold ${\mathrm{Sym}}(n,{\Bbb R})^{++}$ of
positive definite matrices.
An explicit calculation for the minimal distance
function from the geodesic submanifold
${\mathrm{Sym}}(p,{\mathbb R})^{++}\times
{\mathrm{Sym}}(q,{\mathbb R})^{++}$ block diagonally embedded in
${\mathrm{Sym}}(n,{\mathbb R})^{++}$ is
given in terms of metric and
spectral geometric means, Cayley transform, and Schur
complements of positive definite matrices when $p\leq 2$ or $q\leq 2.$